Languid Language Learning

[Elenia]

Well, it's been a while. I passed the Swedish course that I had been taking and am therefore now a certified Swedish speaker.

Grattis! Bra jobbat!

I've certainly listened to over forty hours of this podcast, which is over forty hours of Troendelag dialect.

Which Norwegian podcast is it? (I'm thinking it'll be my next "morning walk" language, but not anytime soon.)

Tack!

The podcast is a knitting podcast, in video format on youtube, so not best suited for walking. It's called Marits Garnkaos

[Elenia]

Jeff! Hur har det gått för dig med På Spåret? Vi har fått ganska goda resultat här de senaste veckorna så jag kan tänka mig att du slog ut alla de andra lagen med dina poäng

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This month is German month. However, I didn't do any German over the weekend. I did do some German Clozemaster earlier on today. It's been such a long time since I last used Clozemaster, my reviews are terrifying! I also skyped with my German friend. I spoke to her a little in German and got most of my verb forms right. Sentence structure was, as usual, a mess. She read to me in German very slowly and patiently, one sentence at a time, pausing after each sentence and repeating them as many times as I needed so that I could understand them. She was reading Odinsbarn, which has finally been translated into German. She was probably among the first Germans to want to read the book and she even bought it last year in Swedish to see if she could stumble her way through.

Class is going well. I sometimes get asked if I understand everything, and the answer has always been yes - up until today. She said a word that I simply did not get. I'm seeing a lot more new words in the pages and pages of assigned reading we have to do. I'm underlining some and writing others down. And I am ignoring some. If I need it, it'll reappear at some point. We have our first bit of work to hand in this week. We'll be doing it at home, so I'll have access to my dictionaries, my thesaurus, svenska.se and my husband. It's not too long, only a page and a half. I'll be fine.

I'm off to Paris in March. I doubt I'll be speaking very much French, but I may surprise myself.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Jeff! Hur har det gått för dig med På Spåret? Vi har fått ganska goda resultat här de senaste veckorna så jag kan tänka mig att du slog ut alla de andra lagen med dina poäng

Inte lika bra i år, tyvärr! Jag har nog bara vunnit över de andra lagen en gång eller två.

[Elenia]

Jeff! Hur har det gått för dig med På Spåret? Vi har fått ganska goda resultat här de senaste veckorna så jag kan tänka mig att du slog ut alla de andra lagen med dina poäng

Inte lika bra i år, tyvärr! Jag har nog bara vunnit över de andra lagen en gång eller två.

Jo men det är väl höga poäng ändå. Vi har kanske kommit emellan de två lagen en enda gång. Vi har haft som sagt lite högre poäng de senaste tre avsnitten men vi brukar ligger runt 12-18 poäng.

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German month continues. 50 more review sentences in Clozemaster plus two normal play sessions. Because I still have cards to review, I am only getting around ten to fifteen new cards, rather than 20. At this pace, I should get through all my review sentences by the end of this month. I need to dig out a German resource that will spoon feed me grammar and pet me when it makes me cry. My friend and I have started messaging each other in Godawful German. Seriously, it's bad. I'm not even trying to get genders right or thinking about case.

Today's class was about översättarens arbete, the translator's work. We had to work in groups to translate try to translate two passages from English to Swedish. The assumption being naturally made that everyone would be translating to their mother tongue. It was rough, but we made it. I now have to write a page and a half of reflection about the subject, to be handed in tomorrow. I can't imagine that the grade boundary will be that high, but I'm sure they would still like correct Swedish. My papers from last semester came back often marked with 'hög grad av korrekthet', so with the help of the Husband, I should be fine.

[Elenia]

Ye gods, German is rough.

I've written and handed in the page and a half of Swedish. The husband looked through the first two paragraphs, but could not look through the last. I made fewer silly verb conjugation mistakes than I usually do, by quite a bit. I made one or two prepositional mistakes, and a couple of typographical errors. I'm not sure how the last paragraph looks, but oh well.

My treasure trove of language resources contains almost nothing for German save some Michel Thomas. Michel Thomas it is, then. It's very easy at current, so I can knit and count while listening. I got a bit restless and decided to search for information about German sentence structure in Swedish. I've found an interesting article, but it is far to difficult for my exhausted brain. I'm going to have to come back to it repeatedly, armed with a dictionary and some kind of shield.

I missed doing Clozemaster yesterday because of the paper, and also because I decided to give up on doing anything remotely sensible at about eight and wrote on my remarkably silly, low-brow story instead.

[DaveAgain]

Ye gods, German is rough.

I got a bit restless and decided to search for information about German sentence structure in Swedish. I've found an interesting article, but it is far to difficult for my exhausted brain. I'm going to have to come back to it repeatedly, armed with a dictionary and some kind of shield.

I finally finished "the loom of language" last month. One snippet that's stayed with me was the suggestion that re-writing a german first draft is much harder than re-writing an english first draft because moving words to different positions in the sentence requires changes their form.

I think Blaurebel mentioned in the past that german books tend to very long sentences, this is one possible explanation for why

[Elenia]

Ye gods, German is rough.

I got a bit restless and decided to search for information about German sentence structure in Swedish. I've found an interesting article, but it is far to difficult for my exhausted brain. I'm going to have to come back to it repeatedly, armed with a dictionary and some kind of shield.

I finally finished "the loom of language" last month. One snippet that's stayed with me was the suggestion that re-writing a german first draft is much harder than re-writing an english first draft because moving words to different positions in the sentence requires changes their form.

I think Blaurebel mentioned in the past that german books tend to very long sentences, this is one possible explanation for why

This is actually something the Swedish article mentions, that German tends to longer, more complex sentences in the written language. I didn't understand all the words in the Swedish text (as I've never read linguistics in Swedish), but it talked about the way German parenthesises and weaves in information within a single sentence.

I'd not thought about the form changes. I might have to continue on not thinking about them - because I find all the moods and aspects and whatnot confusing.

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I meant to post last night, but forgot to do so, that I spontaneously recorded a seven-minute video of myself speaking Swedish. I hadn't planned for it to be so long - I didn't think I'd manage more than three or four minutes - but once I got the ball rolling it didn't seem to want to stop. I compared it to a couple of videos I'd made for the first output challenge in 2015. What a difference! I hadn't looked at them since filming them, so it was really a shock to go back and hear how I spoke. Something I found quite strange was that, in a lot of places, the accent I had when speaking wasn't typical 'Brit speaking Swedish'. Instead, my pronunciation of certain words was actually very similar to the way the two Chinese speakers in my Swedish class would pronounce them. I have no clue where that came from.

I was tempted to record myself speaking in German but, as my German is no way near as good as my Swedish was four years ago, I gave up that idea pretty sharpish.

[Brun Ugle]

Go for it! Record yourself in German, even if you’re terrible. It helped me a lot. I’ve only done a few hours of recording in German, but I’ve gone from having a couple seconds pause between each word to being able to carry on a conversation. I’m sure I still butcher all the genders, cases and conjugations, but I can communicate.

I tried doing videos when I started doing the Output Challenge the first time, but it didn’t work because I could see myself on the screen. I’d start to talk, but then I’d see the person on the screen start to talk, so I’d stop to let them continue, but then they’d stop, so I’d start again and then they’d start, and so on. I’ve had good results doing audio recordings with Audacity though.

I used to have a similar problem with my accent in Norwegian sometimes. I’ve always avoided an American accent fairly well, but sometimes when I’d get nervous, I’d overdo my enunciation and end up sounding German or Polish. My accent can still go all weird when I get nervous, but to be honest, that happens even in English.

[Elenia]

Go for it! Record yourself in German, even if you’re terrible. It helped me a lot. I’ve only done a few hours of recording in German, but I’ve gone from having a couple seconds pause between each word to being able to carry on a conversation. I’m sure I still butcher all the genders, cases and conjugations, but I can communicate.

I tried doing videos when I started doing the Output Challenge the first time, but it didn’t work because I could see myself on the screen. I’d start to talk, but then I’d see the person on the screen start to talk, so I’d stop to let them continue, but then they’d stop, so I’d start again and then they’d start, and so on. I’ve had good results doing audio recordings with Audacity though.

I used to have a similar problem with my accent in Norwegian sometimes. I’ve always avoided an American accent fairly well, but sometimes when I’d get nervous, I’d overdo my enunciation and end up sounding German or Polish. My accent can still go all weird when I get nervous, but to be honest, that happens even in English.

I do speak in German (mostly only a few sentences at a time). The main reason I'm not bothering to record myself is because I have absolutely no idea about grammar. Really, none. My word order is off constantly because I don't know how it should be. If a verb is in the right form, it's usually by chance. I'm not entirely sure which tenses German has, I'm just assuming the standard Germanic set? And I don't even bother with gender or case. Speaking with my friend is okay because it's just a little bit at a time and she corrects me patiently again and again until I get it right. But I won't be recording myself until I find a way of doing grammar that works for me.

Something I have been thinking about is recording myself speaking in Swedish. I'd like to talk about language learning, and maybe a few other topics. If I did so, I'd likely put my videos up on my new blog.

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Editing to add other stuff:

I missed German Clozemaster again yesterday. I did listen to more Michel Thomas, but I had a headache that was mostly expressing itself as dizziness, and I couldn't take the thought of going Clozemaster.

I'm rarely completionist about things, but every now and again I'm gripped with the desire to finish Clozemaster for Swedish.

Morgana's log has me listening to Icelandic radio. Icelandic music is gorgeous, Icelandic is gorgeous. I'd like to get some receptive skills in Icelandic someday but I'd definitely like to get Norwegian skills under my belt before that. I reckon I could get good receptive Norwegian if I really focused on it. I wouldn't be able to do so right now but in the future. I wonder what books Malmö library has to offer? @Janice, I think we have spoken about this before, maybe, but would you be open to dialecting at me in Norwegian at this unspecified point?

I have to read a long, boring text in Swedish for class. Okay, it's not actually that boring but it's definitely not my subect. I guess I should be counting myself lucky, I'm getting a preview of a book that's not been released yet. But it's really not where or when my interest lies.

[Brun Ugle]

That’s how I speak German too. I’m not really sure what the tenses are either, and when there’s one of those big verb-pile-ups at the end of a sentence, I never know what order to put the verbs in.

Sure, I can dialect with you sometime. You could probably find a better model though, like a real Norwegian maybe. But we can chat if you want. I should probably learn some Swedish myself, but I have so many more exciting languages to learn.